Putting an increased focus on deals sales and database growth is the surest way to grow your deals revenue
By focusing on the following 5 things, you can generate significantly more revenue from your deals program.
Deal Quality
Sales Focus
Database Growth
Database Engagement
Evolved Model
To learn more, watch a recording and check out the top takeaways from our 5 Steps to Deals Revenue Growth webinar, for which we were joined by Katie Wilson, the Digital Advertising Director at the Quad-City Times. In 2013, the mid-size paper in Davenport, Iowa generated upwards of $2 million in deal revenue! In fact, the Quad-City Times won Best Overall Promotion in the 2013 Second Street Awards for their efforts with not only deals, but also contests, ballots, email, and more.
DEAL QUALITY
Great deals grow your database, build confidence in your program, give customers a resource they will return to. Bad deals can alienate your audience, make advertisers question your effectiveness, and give competition fodder to sell against you.
Make deal quality a top priority. Before you feature a deal on your site, you should always ask yourself, “Would I buy this deal?” If the answer is no, think about why. Is the deal from a merchant that you really want to align with your brand? Remember – you should never put a deal up just to fill a blank in your calendar!
Run & rerun proven winners. Find a deals subcategory that sells well in your market and really go after it. You can even target the same advertisers for repeat deals. If you offer deals with 6-month expiration dates, a single merchant can run two deals each year! This gives your reps a reason to stay in touch and follow-up with the goal of securing that next offer. Figure out which merchants are the most popular in your market and do your best to keep them on a rotation.
Leverage historical data. Keep track of which deals and categories on your site sell well and which don’t. That way, you can look back at this historical data in following years and see which were the top-selling deals and categories in a given month. This enables you to prospect more efficiently and focus only on the deals and subcategories you know will do well. To streamline your prospecting process even more, download the interactive deals prospecting worksheets!
Have a Deals Review Committee. To help ensure that only the highest-quality deals are featured on your site, put together a team of people from the sales, marketing, and customer service departments to review all of the potential deals brought in by the sales reps. For each one, make sure that the offer is going to be a good deal for everyone involved:
The deal should be a good business decision for the advertiser.
The deal should be a revenue-driver for your company (as well as from a merchant that you want to align with your brand).
The deal should be an enticing offer for your audience.
If you do decide that a particular deal with a high-quality merchant isn’t going to work out, don’t just say no to the merchant – go back with reasons and see if it would be possible to craft a deal with them that would be something you could feature.
SALES FOCUS
Success takes work, but if you focus your attention on deals the earning potential is huge! Let’s face it – who isn’t trying to diversify their digital revenue right now? Deals – even if you don’t have a daily program – are the perfect way to do just that.
Make deals a priority. If you want to succeed with deals, it’s important to have buy-in from everyone in your organization. Start by making sure that there is a deals champion or sales lead in your sales department, and then focus on incentivizing your sellers to make sure that deals are something that your reps want to sell. Finally, align deals with your other sales efforts for maximum impact.
Make deals a regular topic at sales meetings. Deals should be a part of the discussion during every single sales meeting you have. Take a look back over at what ran in the past week and analyze what worked well, what didn’t work so well, and why. And recognize the success of those selling top deals.
Encourage healthy competition among sales reps. Help keep deals top-of-mind in your organization by making it so that any sales rep can sell deals. At the The Quad-City Times, their digital reps can approach any merchant for a deal. This creates a sense of healthy competition, as core reps with account lists have to continually focus on selling deals and/or partner with a digital rep who can close the deal for them. Otherwise, they risk losing a sale to a digital rep.
Keep your sales force trained and informed. You should constantly be running trainings and circulating materials to enable your reps to more effectively sell deals – especially when launching a new promotion like a card or deal store.
DATABASE GROWTH
An average of 66% of deals revenue comes directly from email, and since more great deals mean more email sign-ups, a high-quality deal can make a big difference for your database!
Deliberately grow database with contests and more. Never buy an email list! If you do, your deliverability can be negatively impacted. Instead, focus on growing your email database with online promotions like sweepstakes, submission contests, and ballots, and with additional tactics like free deals. Be sure to ALWAYS include an email opt-in for your deals program, even if the promotion is a revenue-driver (assuming it isn’t an exclusive contest sold to a merchant) and certainly on all of your internal list builders!
Segment your databases so the right people get the right info. Make it easy for people to sign up for your email lists! In addition to including an email opt-in on every single promotion you run, consider adding a footer with subscription buttons on all of the promotional emails you send.
DATABASE ENGAGEMENT
You not only want to put a focus on growing your email database, but also on keeping your current audience actively engaged. Database engagement encourages spending and sharing, plus helps you better target the right advertisers to feature. There are 3 main strategies for encouraging audience engagement:
Keep your audience top-of-mind. Always be asking, “What will keep them interested?” When you are prospecting, assembling your target list, and putting together offers, you should always have your audience demographics in mind.
Keep your audience actively buying. While free deals can certainly help you grow your database and activate dormant buyers, credits are also fantastic tools for keeping your current audience actively engaged and buying on your site. In the case of The Quad-City Times, a simple $5 credit since to inactive buyers caused the recipients to go and buy 1.5x brand new deals on average. Imagine the impact if you had a schedule and plan in place to do this on a regular basis.
Give your audience a voice. Run regular deals surveys to gather information about your audience that you can use to feature better targeted deals and assemble more sophisticated sales materials that show merchants the value of your audience. Here are 5 tips for running your own surveys!
EVOLVE THE MODEL
While a regular daily deals program is great, your future growth is going to come from maintaining high deal quality and experimenting with different approaches. A couple of ways we’ve seen partners grow and evolve is by focusing on things like deals stores and cards that diversify their offerings and layer in additional revenue opportunities.
Deals Stores
Merchants love the extra promotion that goes into deals stores, and the fact that so many deals are running at once makes it possible to pull in advertisers who may not be the best fit for featured deal in your regular program. Each year, the Quad-City Times runs the following deals stores that they have determined to be the most successful for them after a lot of experimentation, and in 2013 they made nearly $400,000 from the promotions!
Valentine’s Day
Mother’s Day
Father’s Day
Shop Local
BIG Deals (this a collection of high-price/high-value deals)
Cyber Week
Stocking Stuffers
Cards
Cards are an opportunity to generate a significant spike in revenue by offering your customers a fantastic set of offers at an unbeatable price. Since they include multiple offers, cards are sold at higher price points than regular deals and yield a higher return on your investment. The most successful card themes are golf, spa, and ski. Learn more about how to add new digital revenue stream with cards in this webinar and takeaways. For even more information, download the How to Add New Revenue with Cards playbook.
SUCCESS STARTS WITH A PLAN
We have put together some resources to help you start on the path to increasing your deals revenue today!
Download the promotions calendar template and the deals prospecting worksheets to start optimizing every stage of the deals sales process.
The post Top Takeaways: 5 Steps to Deals Revenue Growth appeared first on Second Street Lab.